Myths to Live By

by Joseph Campbell

  And with respect to this grim task of procuring sacrificial victims for the furtherance of life, we have as an extreme example the ancient Aztec civilization, where it was supposed that unless human sacrifices were continually immolated on the numerous altars the sun itself would cease to move, time stop, and the universe fall apart. And it was simply to procure sacrifices by hundreds and by thousands that the Aztecs waged on their neighbors continuous war. Their own warriors were honored as priests; and a principle of combat—combats even between the elements, wind and earth, water and fire—was the founding principle of their universe, with the great ritual of war, known as the Flowery War, its highest celebration.

  Now in the very ancient Near East, where grain-planting and -harvesting communities first arose and the earliest towns then came into being, from the eighth millennium B.C. or so onward, an altogether new order of human existence gradually took form, based not on foraging and hunting, but on planting and harvesting crops, with the great and good Mother Earth as the main provider of sustenance. And it was in those times, among those people, that the fertility rites developed that have been the basic rites of all agriculturally founded civilizations ever since: rituals having to do with the plow and of seeding, of reaping, winnowing, and first fruits. For the first thousand years or so of their existence, those earliest little towns were able to survive without protective walls. However, by the sixth millennium B.C., and more prominently during the fifth, walls begin to be evident in the archaeology of those centers of civilized life, and these let us know that ranging warrior peoples were beginning to threaten and occasionally to invade and plunder the now comparatively rich settlements of the peaceable, toiling tillers of the soil.

  The two most important raiding races in the western parts of this newly developing culture field were the cattle-herding Aryans from the grazing-plains of Eastern Europe, and the Semites from the south, from the Syro-Arabian desert, with their flocks of goats and sheep. Both were terribly ruthless fighters, and their raids into the towns and cities were appalling. The Old Testament abounds in accounts of peaceful settlements overwhelmed, ravished, and utterly destroyed. Just imagine! From the watchtowers a dust cloud is spied on the horizon. A windstorm? No! It is a Bedouin band; and next morning there remains not a single living soul within those city walls.

  Fig. 9.3 — Hector Brought back to Troy

  The two greatest works of war mythology in the West are, accordingly, the Iliad and the Old Testament. The late Bronze and early Iron Age Greeks were becoming masters of the ancient Aegean just about when the Amorites, Moabites, and earliest Habiru or Hebrews were overrunning Canaan. These were approximately contemporaneous invasions; and the legends celebrating their victories were developed simultaneously too. Moreover, the basic mythological concepts animating these two bodies of legend were not very different, either. They both pictured a sort of two-storied world, with the floor of earth below, and above, an upper story of divine beings. On the earth-plane below, there were certain wars being waged—of our people overcoming those people—the progress of these wars being directed, however, from aloft. In the case of the Iliad, the various gods of a polytheistic pantheon are supporting variously both sides; for there are quarrels going on up there too, of Poseidon against the will of Zeus, Athene against Aphrodite, and Zeus for a time against Hera. As the arguments fare of the gods aloft, so the fortunes below of the armies on earth. And in fact, one of the most interesting things about the Iliad is that, though composed to honor the Greeks, its greatest honors and respect are for the Trojans. The noble Trojan champion Hector is the leading spiritual hero of the piece. Achilles, beside him, is a thug. And the tender episode, in Book VI, of Hector’s departure into battle from Andromache his wife and their little son Astyanax (”like a beautiful star” in his nurse’s arms) is surely the supreme moment of humanity, gentleness, and true manliness of the entire work.

  “Dear my lord,” the good wife pleaded, “this thy hardihood will undo thee; for soon will the Achaians all set upon thee and slay thee.” And her splendid husband answered: “I pray thee, dear one, be not of oversorrowful heart. No man against my fate shall hurl me into Hades: only destiny, which no man has ever escaped, whether coward or valiant, once he has been born.” And when the little boy shrank in fear from his father’s shining helmet with its horsehair crest, Hector laughed aloud and, removing it, laid it gleaming on the earth, then kissed his son, dandled him in his arms, and spoke a prayer for him to Zeus before departing to be slain.

  Or consider that magnificent tragedy of Aeschylus, The Persians: what an extraordinary production to have been presented in a Greek city hardly twenty years after Aeschylus himself had fought the invading Persians at Salamis! The setting is in Persia, with the queen of Persia and her court discussing the return of their defeated king Xerxes from that battle. It is written from the Persian point of view and shows with what respect and great capacity for empathy the ancient Greeks could regard even their most threatening enemy of that time.

  But when we turn from the Iliad and Athens to Jerusalem and the Old Testament, it is to a mythology with a very different upper story and very different power up there: not a polytheistic pantheon favoring both sides simultaneously, but a single-minded single deity, with his sympathies forever on one side. And the enemy, accordingly, no matter who it may be, is handled in this literature in a manner in striking contrast to the Greek, pretty much as though he were subhuman: not a “Thou” (to use Martin Buber’s term), but a thing, an “It.” I have chosen a few characteristic passages that we shall all—I am sure—readily recognize, and which, rehearsed in the present context, may help us to realize that we have been bred to one of the most brutal war mythologies of all time. First, then, as follows:

  When the Lord your God brings you into the land which you are entering to take possession of it, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than yourselves, and when the Lord your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them; then you must utterly destroy them; you shall make no covenant with them and show them no mercy. You shall not make marriages with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons. For they would turn away your sons from following me, to serve other gods; then the anger of the Lord would be kindled against you, and he would destroy you utterly. But thus shall you deal with them: you shall break down their altars, and dash in pieces their pillars, and hew down their Asherim, and burn their graven images with fire. For you are a people holy to the Lord your God; the Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his own possession, out of all the peoples that are on the face of the earth.5

  When you draw near to a city to fight against it, offer terms of peace to it. And if its answer to you is peace and it opens to you, then all the people who are found in it shall do forced labor for you and shall serve you. But if it makes no peace with you, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it; and when the Lord your God gives it into your hand you shall put all its males to the sword, but the women and the little ones, the cattle, and everything else in the city, all its spoils, you shall take as booty for yourselves; and you shall enjoy the spoil of your enemies, which the Lord your God has given you. Thus you shall do to all the cities which are very far from you, which are not cities of the nations here. But in the cities of these people that the Lord your God gives you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the Lord your God has commanded.6

  And when the Lord your God brings you into the land which he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give you, with great and goodly cities, which you did not build, and houses full of all good things, which you did not fill, and cisterns hewn out, which you did not hew, and vineyards and olive trees, which you
did not plant, and when you eat and are full, then take heed lest you forget the Lord, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.7

  And when, in reading, we move on from Deuteronomy to the greatest war book of all, of Joshua, there is—most famous of all—the legend of the fall of Jericho. The trumpets blew, the walls fell down. “And then,” as we read, “they utterly destroyed all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and asses, with the edge of the sword... And they burned the city with fire, and all within it; only the silver and gold, and the vessels of bronze and of iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the Lord.”8 The next city was Ai. “And Israel smote them, until there was left none that survived or escaped... And all who fell that day, both men and women, were twelve thousand, all of the people of Ai.”9 “And so Joshua defeated the whole land, the hill country and the Negeb, and the lowland and the slopes, and their kings. He left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel commanded.”10

  And that, the very same Lord God so frequently cited by our doves of peace today as having taught, “Thou shall not kill!”

  Moreover, we have next the Book of Judges, with that story at the end of it of how the tribe of Benjamin got their wives.11 The earliest hymn of the Bible, Deborah’s song, is a war song.12 In the Book of Kings we have those utterly monstrous bloodbaths accomplished in the name, of course, of Yahweh by Elijah and Elisha. Next come the reforms of Josiah;13 shortly following which, however, Jerusalem itself is besieged and taken by the King of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, in the year 586 B.C.14

  But above and beyond all this there soars that beautiful ideal of an ultimate and universal peace, which, from the time of Isaiah onward, has played so alluringly through all the leading war mythologies of the West. There is, for example, that beguiling image so frequently cited, at the close of Isaiah 65, where “the wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox; and dust shall be the serpent’s food. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain, says the Lord.” However, just a little earlier in the same Isaiah we have already been given to know what the ideal of the peace to come is actually to be: “The foreigners,” we have there to read,

  shall build up your walls and their kings shall minister to you; for in my wrath I smote you, but in my favor I have had mercy on you. Your gates shall be open continually; day and night they shall not be shut; that men may bring to you the wealth of nations, with their kings led in procession. For the nation and kingdom that will not serve you shall perish; those nations shall be utterly laid waste. The glory of Lebanon shall come to you, the cypress, the plane tree, and the pine, to beautify the place of my sanctuary; and I will make the place of my feet glorious. The sons of those who oppressed you shall come bending low to you; and all who despised you shall bow down at your feet; they shall call you the City of the Lord, the Zion of the Holy One of Israel.15

  Now it was strange, and not a little threatening and awesome, to hear echoes of these same themes emanating from the jubilation of victory in Israel, just following the six-day Blitzkrieg and Sabbath on the seventh, of recent date.16 This mythology, that is to say, unlike the ancient Greek, is still very much alive. And of course, to complete the picture, the Arabs have their divinely authorized war mythology too. For they too are a people who, according to their legend, are of the seed of Abraham: the progeny of Ishmael, his first and elder son. Moreover, according to this history, confirmed in the Koran, it was Abraham and Ishmael, before the birth of Isaac, who built in Mecca the sanctuary of the Kaaba, which is the uniting central symbol and shrine of the entire Arab world and of all Islam. The Arabs revere and derive their beliefs from the same prophets as the Hebrews. They honor Abraham, honor Moses. They greatly honor Solomon. They honor Jesus too, as a prophet, Mohammed, however, is their ultimate prophet, and from him—who was a considerable warrior himself—they have derived their fanatic mythology of unrelenting war in God’s name.

  The jihad, the duty of the Holy War, is a concept developed from certain passages of the Koran which, during the period of the Great Conquests (from the seventh to tenth centuries), were interpreted as defining the bounden duty of every Moslem male who is free, of full age, in full possession of his intellectual powers, and physically fit for service. “Fighting is prescribed for you,” we read. “True, you have an antipathy to it: however, it is possible that your antipathy is to something that is nevertheless good for you. God knows, and you know not.”17 To fight in the cause of Truth is one of the highest forms of charity,” I read in a commentary to this passage. “What can you offer that is more precious than your own life?” All lands not belonging to “the territory of Islam” (dar al-Islam) are to be conquered and are known, therefore, as “the territory of war” (dar al-harb). “I am commanded,” the Prophet is reported to have said, “to fight until men bear witness, there is no god but God and his Messenger is Mohammed.” According to the ideal, one campaign a year, at least, must be undertaken by every Moslem prince against unbelievers. However, where this proves to be no longer possible, it suffices if an army, efficiently maintained, is kept trained and ready for the jihad.

  And the Jews, “the People of the Book,” as they are here called, hold a special place in this thinking, since it was they who first received God’s Word but then (according to Mohammed’s view) repeatedly forsook it, backsliding, rejecting, and even slaying God’s later prophets. In the Koran they are repeatedly addressed and threatened: of which passages I shall cite but one (and wherever the word “We” appears in this text, the reference is to God; where “you,” to the Jews; while the “Book” is the Bible):

  And We gave clear warning to the Children of Israel in the Book that twice would they do mischief on the earth and be elated with mighty arrogance, and twice would they be punished. When the first warnings came to pass, We sent against you Our servants given to terrible warfare [the Babylonians, 685 B.C.]: they entered the very inmost parts of your homes; and it was a warning completely fulfilled. Then did we grant you the Return as against them; We gave you increase in resources and sons, and made you the more numerous in manpower. If ye did well, ye did well for yourselves; if ye did evil, ye did it against yourselves. So when the second of the warnings came to pass, we permitted your enemies to disfigure your faces and to enter your Temple [the Romans, 70 A.D.] as it had been entered before, and to visit with destruction all that fell into their power. It may be that your Lord may yet show Mercy unto you; but if ye revert to your sins, we shall revert to Our punishments: and We have made Hell a prison for those who reject the Faith.18

  These, then, are the two war mythologies that are even today confronting each other in the highly contentious Near East and may yet explode our planet.

  However, to return in thought to the past, of which our present is the continuation: the old Biblical ideal of offering a holocaust to Yahweh by massacring every living thing in a captured town or city was but the Hebrew version of a custom general to the early Semites: the Moabites, the Amorites, the Assyrians, and all. However, about the middle of the eighth century B.C. the Assyrian Tiglath Pilesar III (r. 745–727 B.C.) seems to have noticed that when everybody in a conquered province is slain there is no one left to enslave. Yet if any remain alive, they presently pull themselves together, and one has a revolt to put down. Tiglath Pilesar invented the procedure, therefore, of transferring populations from one region to another: when a city had been taken, its entire population was to be condemned to forced labor elsewhere, and the inhabitants of that other place transferred to the vacated site. The idea was effective and caught on; so that by the time two centuries more had elapsed, the entire Near East had been unsettled. There was hardly a land-rooted people left. When Israel fell its people were not massacred, as they would have been half a century earlier. They were taken somewhere else, and another people (known later as Samaritans) was brought to inhabit their former kingdom. And so also when Jerusalem fell in t
he year 586 B.C., its people were not massacred but transferred to Babylon, where, as we read in the famous Psalm 137:

  By the waters of Babylon,

  there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion.

  On the willows there we hung up our lyres.

  For there our captors required of us songs,

  and our tormentors, mirth, saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

  How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?

  If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither!

  Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you,

  if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy!

  Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem,

  how they said, “Raze it, raze it! Down to its foundations!”